Social media threats hyped by science reporting, not science

Does using Twitter make you indifferent to the suffering of others? Will …

It has been a bad week for social media—based on the headlines, at least. News reports have linked Facebook use to poor grades, while Twitter wound up being accused of putting morality itself at risk. Needless to say, the studies behind the headlines didn't lend themselves to this sort of easy characterization. This is a relatively common occurrence—it's rare for a month to go by where we don't consider doing a story that primarily involves debunking a news report that gets the science wrong. But this time, we decided to try to trace back and figure out how these stories developed.

Facebook and failure

The Facebook stories start with a study by an Ohio State graduate student, Aryn Karpinski, who surveyed Ohio State students on their use of Facebook. Karpinski obtained a variety of additional information on her subjects' activities and grades, and her data revealed correlations between using the social networking site and a variety of factors, such as the student's major, extracurricular activities, time spent at work, and grades. An abstract on the work was accepted for presentation at the American Educational Research Association's annual meeting, where Karpinski will be presenting her work on Thursday.

The work started to leave the standard academic publication track when a press officer at Ohio State saw the abstract. "The Ohio State Director of Research Communications noticed the abstract in the program," Karpinski said, "and he made the decision to go with a press release." That press release exercises the same sort of caution that Karpinski did when talking with Ars, noting that the survey results are a pilot study and recognizing the limits of the data. "We can't say that use of Facebook leads to lower grades and less studying," she's quoted as saying, "but we did find a relationship there."

That press release attracted the attention of someone at The Sunday Times of London, who prepared a story on the work. "I was given the opportunity to see an early version of The Times' story, and everything looked good with that," Karpinski told Ars, but things went downhill from there. "First, they broke the embargo," she said. "They were supposed to hold the story until the presentation [scheduled for April 16], but it wound up being published on Sunday [the 12th], and the story that got published was different from the one I had seen."

In her view, the published version of the story blurs the lines between correlation and causation, and doesn't accurately convey her understanding of things. "For example, there's a point where they use the term 'significant' in quotes, in a way that implies I said it," Karpinsky said. "For me, significant means something very specific—it's a p value—and it wasn't used that way in this context."

Karpinski was quick to note that most coverage of her work did a much better job—she cited everyone from USA Today to The Chronicle of Higher Education as getting things right—but the report in The Sunday Times came out first, and probably had a large influence on how the study was perceived.

For her part, Karpinski isn't even sure what she's going to do with the data. She's interested in performing multiple regression analysis to try to identify whether there might be other factors worth looking at, but trying to go beyond the correlations she has seen will be challenging. "The sort of longitudinal study that might provide some perspective on causation probably isn't possible anymore," she said, given the high rates of Facebook use. If nothing else, the widespread reporting of her results may help university faculty, as she said, "hopefully, it'll be a teaching moment about the difference between correlation and causation."

Experiments and interpretations of moral behavior

The second round of stories focused on the negative impact that rapid-fire media could have on aspects of the emotional processing of moral and ethical behavior. The stories are based on a publication that will appear in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science sometime this week. Due to the way that PNAS releases stories, however, the paper itself isn't yet available to anyone but the press, who were able to report on it starting Monday evening.

The paper itself is both solid and interesting. Researchers developed a set of stories and images that evoked various complex feelings about others: compassion for physical and social discomfort, and admiration for the skillful or virtuous behavior of others. Most of the paper describes the use of functional MRI imaging to track the regions of the brain that were involved in processing these stories, identifying a set of overlapping but distinct areas that handled the four different classes of stories. The authors also tracked the timecourse of this response in one brain structure, and saw that the response to physical pain peaked the earliest, at about six seconds after the stimulus; the rest didn't hit their peak until roughly four seconds later.

The precise details of this timing experiment are in the supplemental data for this paper, which wasn't yet available as of Thursday morning. It appears that the researchers used indications of an emotional response, such as changes in breathing and heart rate, to normalize the start of the timing.

The timing experiments occupy a small part of the paper, and a correspondingly small part of the paper's discussion. But that part is striking for how it suggests these few seconds may have significant societal implications:

If replicated, this finding could have import and implications for the role of culture and education in the development and operation of social and moral systems; in order for emotions about the psychological situations of others to be induced and experienced, additional time may be needed for the introspective processing of culturally shaped social knowledge. The rapidity and parallel processing of attention-requiring information, which hallmark the digital age, might reduce the frequency of full experience of such emotions, with potentially negative consequences.

In short, the paper suggests digital media may make us too busy to fully register examples of others engaged in ethical behavior.

The language used by the authors—"may" and "could" feature prominently—is appropriately cautious but, even then, this seems like a significant extrapolation from the results. The method used to track brain activity lags the involvement of the actual neurons, which exaggerates the time required to detect the signal, and the differences among the responses were small relative to the total signal (which, in turn, is small relative to the overall brain activity). More significantly, the data is also, as it is in Karpinski's case, a correlation; the brain activity being tracked is associated with the emotional impact of the stories, but it's not clear that it signifies the "full experience of such emotions."

Even assuming the connection is real and significant, it's not clear that the digital era has presented unique opportunities for distraction, or whether a distraction would even interfere with the signals detected in these experiments. That latter possibility could be tested; so far, the test hasn't been reported. So, it appears that this small portion of the paper contains some speculation that, when phrased cautiously, made it through peer review.

Twittering away morality

Somehow, on the road to the public, this small bit of speculation became the focus. For this, it appears we can thank the press release, which was originally entitled "Tweet this: Rapid-fire media may confuse your moral compass." (This release has since been significantly revised.) The few seconds of lag between when responses peaked is described vaguely as "much longer" and the potential that rapid changes of topic could interfere with emotional processing—which is purely hypothetical—is presented as a given: "The study raises questions about the emotional cost—particularly for the developing brain—of heavy reliance on a rapid stream of news snippets obtained through television, online feeds or social networks such as Twitter.

It's no surprise, given the press release, that, when reports on the study appeared, they largely followed along the same lines. So, for example, CNN's coverage of the study began with, "rapid-fire TV news bulletins or getting updates via social-networking tools such as Twitter could numb our sense of morality and make us indifferent to human suffering, scientists say." The CNN report mentioned Twitter five times. Britain's Daily Mail went further, headlining its article "Twitter can make you immoral, claim scientists." To be fair, the story also sparked a number of skeptical responses, but those tended to filter out over several days after the initial round of articles appeared.